"Do it for the plot."
I've been publishing these annual reviews publicly for over 10+ years. While they primarily serve as a personal record of my life, I thoroughly enjoy reading others' reviews, so I'm sharing mine.
You know that saying about how life is what happens while you're busy making other plans? Yeah, welcome to my 2024. Last December, I wrote this whole elaborate plan for the year—getting fit, building an app, growing my personal brand. Classic "fresh start" energy.
Meanwhile, the universe was in the corner like "That's cute. Hold my beer."
I've always viewed life like a video game—each level gets progressively harder, but you level up along the way, gaining the skills needed for bigger challenges. What I didn't expect was to get thrown into a secret bonus level: buying back my own company. That's definitely not something they prepare you for in business school (not that I went to business school, but you get the point 😅).
When the opportunity to buy back BestSelf presented itself, I didn't have some grand vision—just a good deal and an unshakeable feeling that something was unfinished. Actually, that's not entirely true. What I also had was my wife's encouragement and a thought that kept nagging at me: "This would make a great story."
Turns out running an e-commerce business as a toddler parent with limited hours is a very different game than running it with a full team and endless hustle hours. But here's the twist—it's actually working better. We're at half the revenue but 4x the profit.
When you're the main character in your own life story, you have to ask yourself: when I close this book, will it be worth reading?
TLDR; Always do it for the plot. Makes for a more interesting book.
In January 2024, I bought back BestSelf Co from the PE firm I sold it to in 2022.
As I approach the one-year mark, I can say that while the journey hasn't been smooth sailing, buying back was the right call. You don't often get a chance to do things better a second time, and I'm building differently this time around:
The operational transformation has been just as dramatic. Gone are the days of a full finance team; where before we had a finance team handling everything now I have software and a fractional CFO. I know all my numbers at all times. What gets measured gets managed.
Since buying back the business, I've become much more efficient with expenses and spending. My perspective has shifted dramatically—now I look at every expense through this lens: each cost will effectively multiply 4-5 times when you go to sell your company. For example:
This year brought some delightful surprises in parenting. Turns out Emily and I—both former tomboys—found ourselves navigating the glittery world of a princess-loving, pink-obsessed tiny human. Turns out she's teaching us more about flexibility and patience than any business ever could.
The most unexpected joy has been watching Quinn's personality emerge in full force. All those nature versus nurture debates hit different when your tiny human develops interests completely opposite to your own.
What I'm most proud of is the intentional family we've created in Austin. Between our immediate family, our chosen family of friends, and our donor's family, we've built a beautiful community of people who are actively creating their lives together. It's exactly the kind of environment I want Quinn to grow up in—where family isn't just about blood relations but about the intentional connections we nurture.
As she grows, I'm finding more ways to connect and teach—even turning our compromises into wins. Take our weekend routine: while I work out on the Tonal, she watches Bluey next to me. Now she's become my tiny accountability partner, regularly announcing, "Momma, we need to workout!"
If there's an MVP of 2024, it's artificial intelligence. For $20 a month, I gained a co-founder who’s always available to work, never complains, and is always ready for the next challenge. ChatGPT and Claude have become far more than tools—they're strategic partners in every aspect of the business.
For someone with ADHD who tends to act first and think later (which serves me well most of the time), having an always-on thought partner has been transformative. The feedback loop between idea and execution has shrunk dramatically. Tasks that once required multiple team members and lengthy cycles now happen almost instantly.
Think of it as having a writing coach, coding mentor, and strategic advisor rolled into one and available 24/7. But here's what surprised me most: AI has become a mirror for self-understanding. Just as people are more honest with Google than their friends, my conversations with AI have revealed patterns in my thinking I never noticed before.
The impact has been game-changing across every aspect of the business:
The real magic isn't just in the efficiency—it's in how AI has helped bridge the gap between my entrepreneurial ambitions and the reality of limited time. When you can't pull those endless startup hours anymore (hello, daycare pickup times), having a tireless partner becomes invaluable.
A well-crafted prompt chain can now accomplish what used to require multiple meetings and team members, letting me maintain high standards within tight time constraints.
I probably read less and had way less time for traditional professional development this year. Although I feel like I leveled up more than ever. It's amazing what you can do with limited time when you're strategic about it (hello, working parent life 👋).
After my year of figuring out what's next, I jumped back into the entrepreneur community scene—but this time with more intention about where I spent my energy:
The structured accountability these communities provided was exactly what I needed during an otherwise unstructured year of rebuilding.
AI became a major focus—not just learning about it, but applying it practically to business problems. This was actually one of my motivations for buying back BestSelf. While I'd been exploring AI applications, I needed a real business to apply it to. Rather than learning a new business AND new technology simultaneously, I could apply cutting-edge tools to familiar problems.
I also completed the full Ultraspeaking. It turned out to be exactly what I needed, even though I signed up at what felt like the worst possible time. Full review here
Building a team from scratch while maintaining operations felt like changing a tire while the car was moving down a highway. Not advised.
When I bought back the company, I faced an interesting choice. While I loved my old team (who had moved on after the PE firm let everyone go), I saw an opportunity in starting fresh. It was like looking at a hill covered in fresh snow—bringing back former employees would've been like following existing paths, familiar and safe. But I wanted to explore what else was possible without being forced down those familiar trails.
Was it the smartest move? I'm still not sure. While I did bring back our talented designer, choosing to build a mostly new team meant learning everything the hard way. Without the institutional knowledge of veteran team members, every hire became an experiment, leading to more turnover than I'd ever experienced.
When you don't intimately know a role inside out, it's harder to hire for it. In the early days of BestSelf 1.0, I'd done every job myself—this time, I was hiring for positions I'd been removed from for years or never touched at all.
The challenge was amplified by incomplete documentation and limited time.
The hardest moment came when my granda died in May 2024 at the age of 93. Living abroad for nearly 13 years means accepting that you'll miss important moments—but knowing that doesn't make it easier. I learned about his death the same day I was scheduled to present at an Ezra Firestone event.
That week became a blur of emotions and obligations: delivering a presentation while processing grief, then facing a keynote speech in Mexico just days later (which I didn't even know was the conference keynote until the opening dinner).
The timing made it logistically impossible to attend his funeral in Ireland—getting from Austin to Ireland and then to Mexico within 4 days wasn't feasible. While my dad assured me that my granda wouldn't have wanted me to make that difficult journey, the guilt lingered. It highlighted the real cost of building a life far from home.
When you live abroad, you experience family life in vacation-mode snapshots while everyone else lives their normal routine. Your visits home become these condensed periods of trying to catch up on months or years of daily life you've missed. It's a different kind of loss—subtle but constant.
In a different kind of loss, one of the harder aspects of buying back BestSelf was losing a friendship in the process. Initially, I'd planned to give up majority ownership, letting someone else run it while I advised from the sidelines. But then came an eleventh-hour power play where they tried to change terms last-minute, thinking I'd either cave or walk away completely.
Looking back, I can see how they'd been subtly undermining the deal's value all along, making me question it with comments like "I'm not sure if it's a good deal." Only later, after discussing with entrepreneur friends and investors, did I realize just how solid the original deal was (and it only got better). Thanks to my wife's encouragement to take the deal and figure it out myself—at worst, I could always option it to someone else if needed.
Sometimes the best gifts don't come wrapped—they come disguised as other people's poor choices.
Living far from family creates another challenge: when they visit, it's never just a casual drop-by. From mid-October through early January, we had almost constant visitors. While precious, these extended stays mean switching into "host mode" instead of living your normal routine. This became particularly challenging during Q4—the most crucial period in e-commerce.
The timing couldn't have been more complicated. After 12 years in e-commerce, I was facing my first hands-on Black Friday in years. Previous years I'd either had a solid team handling it or had sold the business. This year was different. When my project manager announced they were taking Black Friday off (on Thanksgiving, no less), with preparations incomplete, I had to dive in completely.
I couldn't afford to take time off—I’m speaking more strategically than financially. You see I'd given myself until Q2 2025 to decide the business's future and what I wanted to do with it. A poor Q4 performance would limit my options significantly. The grind wasn't about immediate profits; it was about keeping doors open for whatever comes next.
The constant balance between running a business and being present as a parent remained challenging. The constraint of daycare hours forced better time management but also created pressure to maximize every working minute.
My morning routine has always been crucial for feeling balanced. I lost that for a while with Quinn but now I've made it a priority to wake up early so I can get a few hours to myself before the chaos begins. When I do that I am a much better partner and parent.
I'm going to do an entire post on all my favorite tools/services and how they're helping me run a more profitable business because each of these have been amazing.
They say you can't edit a blank page. Well, 2024 was about picking up the pen and writing a plot twist nobody saw coming—myself included. While buying back BestSelf wasn't in last year's plans, it turned out to be exactly the chapter I needed to write.
But here's the thing about plot twists: once the dust settles, you need to figure out where the story goes next. For most of 2024, I've been in survival mode—putting out fires and keeping the lights on. That's not a story arc; that's just treading water.
This year has taught me something crucial about myself: while I excel at creative projects and solving problems, I get bogged down in day-to-day operations. As Tony Robbins says, there's "the business you're in" and "the business you need to be in." Right now, I'm caught between the two.
The next chapter needs a different approach. At the end of 2024, I brought on an executive coach to help me identify my blind spots and chart the path forward. The goal? To step back from daily management and focus on product development and innovation—similar to the structure I had before selling the business, but better as I'm much more engaged now.
One of the most exciting developments heading into 2025 is my newfound ability to bring digital ideas to life. For years, I've had a folder full of app ideas and digital tools I wished existed, but they remained just that—ideas. The traditional barrier of "learn to code first" kept these dreams firmly in the "someday" category.
That all changed when I discovered how to leverage AI for coding through Nat Eliason's "Build Your Own Apps" course. Instead of getting lost in technical documentation and debugging, I can now focus on what matters—bringing ideas to life.
These aren't just side projects—they're the beginning of a new chapter where I can finally bring my digital ideas to life without becoming a full-time developer. My 2025 will be focused on three main areas:
What's next? If this year taught me anything, it's that sometimes the best stories are the ones you never planned to tell. But they still need a direction. Stay tuned for my 2025 goals in a few days, or catch the behind-the-scenes version in my newsletter.
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